Telephone companies collect information on calls made by its customers to create billing statements, monitor and diagnose system performance, and manage the telephone network. The collected information is formatted into individual files commonly termed call records. A call record may pertain to a single call or multiple calls made over a predefined time period. The call records may also include different sets of information, some with more detailed data than others, as defined by the telephone companies. Because call records have many uses, each telephone company may desire to receive call records with a number of unique and different formats to satisfy its own needs. Over time, telephone companies may further desire to alter the format of one or more of the call records to suit changing needs.
Currently because call data collection and call record formatting software are hard-coded, software engineers must spend many hours to generate or modify the source code of the computer programs performing these tasks in order to tailor them to the needs of each telephone company. The same also must be done when a telephone company desires to change one of its call record formats. The new or modified source code must then be debugged and recompiled before it can be brought on-line. As a result, long lead time is typically required to make any change to the call data collection and call record format and the call record collection process is rigid and not easily adaptable to changing needs.